iambiguous wrote:In other words, there are choices that we make in which we are able to calculate if they were in fact mistakes. Or certainly if they led to disaster.

But how do we determine if in fact morally we ought to have chosen other behaviors instead?

I believe I said a couple of times that I understand the Is/ought distinction and also asked you not to keep explaining it to me.

First of all, while this thread is now basically an exchange between the two us, any number of others may well be following it. So, I am making my argument to them as well.

Why is that important to me?

Because only by bumping into an assessment that nudges me up out of the hole I'm in [re fascism and other conflicted value judgments] am I likely to benefit from these discussions.

That's really all I have left to cling to as the clock ticking toward oblivion gets louder and louder and louder.

Secondly, all I can do on this thread is to grope to understand your own "I" in relationship to something like fascism; and to note in turn how you have somehow managed to configure a "sense of self" here that appears considerbly less fractured and fragmented than my own.

All the while acknowledging as I do that this critical distinction is not something the moral and political objectivists are likely to factor into the behaviors that they choose.

Instead, they derive their own comfort and consolation the old fashioned way: through the "real me" in sync with "the right thing to do".

In other words, the tried and true existential font down through the ages historically. Sometimes God, sometimes not.

I can only note that it does not work for "me" out in the world of conflicting goods.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: 1) define 'works' 2) does whatever you do 'work' 3) do you have any reason to believe what you are trying to find 'works' and 'exists'

Karpel Tunnel wrote: Notice above how I asked for a definition of works and then asked two yes/no questions. You did define works in relation to is type issues. I don't see answers to the other two questions.

Okay...

2] "does whatever you do 'work'"?

Obviously:

a] What am I doing? Why am I doing it?b] Can I calculate/measure whether I have in fact accomplished the task I set out for myself? Did the behaviors I choose work?

Example:

I choose to come into ILP because I calculate that if I note the hole that I am in, others may well be willing to share with me the reasons that they are not in that hole themselves. Did that work? Yes. Over the years many here have offered up alternative narratives/agendas.

But: Have I in fact come upon an assessment able to yank me up out of the hole that "I" am in? No, not yet. So, in regard to that, the behavior that I chose [to come here] did not work.

And, in part, because "here and now" I am still convinced that this...

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

....is a reasonable understanding of human is/ought interactions in a No God world. Perhaps even the most reasonable.

3] "do you have any reason to believe what you are trying to find 'works' and 'exists'"?

Back again to #2.

Something can be calculated to work if everyone can agree on what it is that constitutes "working"? Does the technology/methodolgy employed by penal institutions to execute prisoners work? Well, yes or no, right?

Do the arguments employed by those on either side of the political spectrum work to establish the most rational policy here...or a policy said to embody the "best of all possible worlds"?

You tell me.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: And your answer to question 1 does not help me understand what you mean when you assess me by sayingit works for you.

Then maybe we are just "stuck" here. How can I make it any clearer then to note the historical facts that everyone can agree on regarding fascism, and the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no philosophers, ethicists or political scientists have yet been able to establish definitively that fascism works better than all other governing bodies.

Does it? How would this be demonstrated? And how would the anti-fascists demonstrate that it reflects instead the worst of all possible governing bodies?

As for "I" in all of this, I was raised in a truly reactionary community. I was a racist, a sexist, a homophobe. The folks I lived around constituted precisely the sort of white working class demographic that flock to Trump today. I don't recall the word fascism coming up in my neighborhood but I suspect I would have embraced it.

Then the Army. Then Vietnam. Then Mac and John and Steve and all the folks that reconfigured "I" from a right wing fanatic into a radical leftist. Then John and Mary and Barrett and "rival goods". Then existentialism, deconstruction, semiotics. Then nihilsm.

Then the fucking hole.

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

iambiguous wrote:First of all, while this thread is now basically an exchange between the two us, any number of others may well be following it. So, I am making my argument to them as well.

OK, fair enough. Now I know what's happening.

Why is that important to me?

Because only by bumping into an assessment that nudges me up out of the hole I'm in [re fascism and other conflicted value judgments] am I likely to benefit from these discussions.

Then I should probably bow out. I will not produce a solution to conflicted value judgments, not in the sense of a method to resolve which right.

Secondly, all I can do on this thread is to grope to understand your own "I" in relationship to something like fascism; and to note in turn how you have somehow managed to configure a "sense of self" here that appears considerbly less fractured and fragmented than my own.

OK

All the while acknowledging as I do that this critical distinction is not something the moral and political objectivists are likely to factor into the behaviors that they choose.

Is ought, you mean?

Instead, they derive their own comfort and consolation the old fashioned way: through the "real me" in sync with "the right thing to do".

Ah, objective morals, monad self.

Okay...

2] "does whatever you do 'work'"?

Obviously:

a] What am I doing? Why am I doing it?b] Can I calculate/measure whether I have in fact accomplished the task I set out for myself? Did the behaviors I choose work?

Example:

I choose to come into ILP because I calculate that if I note the hole that I am in, others may well be willing to share with me the reasons that they are not in that hole themselves. Did that work? Yes. Over the years many here have offered up alternative narratives/agendas.

But: Have I in fact come upon an assessment able to yank me up out of the hole that "I" am in? No, not yet. So, in regard to that, the behavior that I chose [to come here] did not work.

OK

And, in part, because "here and now" I am still convinced that this...

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

OK. I can get that, i guess. It was challenging when I started to feel distance from the left. I identified with them. I don't really now. For most of my life this did not mean I thought in terms of objective morals. But still I identified, felt aligned with them. Preferred how they interacted with children - me being one for a while - and the world they seemed to want to create. Don't get me wrong, I still tend to prefer to hang out with lefties. There is more of a home there, but perhaps one difference between you and me is I always felt alienated by every group: religious, philosophical, political, cultural. And that included the left. I never thought there was a simple relation to the USSR. I didn't think Reagan was wrong about the evil empire, though I thought he was evil also. Or really, you could translate that into preferences, but I found little to like about soviet relations to its own peoples and the left's dismissal of Reagan there seemed anti-right rather than noticing the object of the remark.

I can remember sitting in a theater watching a movie where a cia agent/diplomat character tells a liberal trying to find his child that it was easy for him to judge US foreign policy while at the same time not really paying attention to it and accepting benefits from it. That there was something facile about the fathers position. I felt sympathy for that judgment, though I disagreed with the policy in question. The entire mainly ivy league audience hissed at the CIA agent. I thought then and think now that these mainly very priviledged people liked the idea of hissing, but in the end were happy and snug in policies they claim to hate on occasion. I'll bet most of them went for Bush 2's start of Gulf War 2.

I found that all groups had strong taboos and social punishments and seemed unable to quesiton their sources, whether the Nation, the Times, or whatever WF Buckley read.

I hated the way the Left was happy to indoctrinate children. I certainly noticed that the right did this too.

I found it odd that the Left had trouble criticizing hilariously poor systems of belief like the psychiatric/pharma worldview.

In the left's hatred of religion, I saw all sorts of baby bathwater smugness, the same certainties I could find in the scientific community, based on very little and very little understanding of the phenomena they poo pooed.

Very little actual experiential curiosity. A lot of hearsay certainty by all major groups. My respect went down on all sides.

There were a variety of norms to choose from or around me and in various ways they all made me feel like a weirdo. I might have agreed about many policies with one, but tempermentally I did not fit in. My sense of psychological health. My sense of humor. The depth of my emotions. I just kept encountering limited norms. I don't think most people want to notice what they really feel - I know how that phrase will hit you but there are degrees of cluelessness around introspection - or through what process they came to their opinions. IOW ceongnitive dissonence, potential hypocrisy, 'negative' emotions, confusion, anomolies are regularly denied by most people, as far as I can tell. And then do not feel the urge to explore that.

So, my alienation from categories and groups has been there a long time and this goes way back into childhood. Nothing like childhood trauma to make you curious about the anomolies around experts. I noticed at a very early age that there was a systematic cluelessness and pardigmantic idiocy amongst supposedly scientific experts. Not individual errors or areas that need improvment, but systematic problems. That made me come at all kinds of expert 'knowledge' with skepticism.

It is frustrating. I would love to be able to go to an association or church and just hang with my fellow Xs. But it has been this way for a long time.

I have during that time met people who also notice anomolies, don't fit categories well, and have a vague tribe who I do not get to spend enough time with. And then there is my wife. Took a lot of really messed up relationships to find someone who I can tell all my reactions to. Who knows she has her own cellar with beasts and monsters in it, can sit with contradictions in herself for a long time, better than me.

My focus has then been for a long time unification in myself and finding people who I do not experience I must actively hide much from. Always a matter of degree, but I have found people where there is such a degree of acceptance between us that it is qualitatively different.

And while I try to find the truth, whatever that means, in traditional ways, I am very experientially based. Dewey, apprentice, exploratory. I don't expect so much change to come through reading or dialogue, though it can sort of aim some of the experiential work.

I follow anomolies, things that do not fit what experts tell us is the good and the real. I see no mainstream paradigm that adequately explains what I can repeatedly experience, not all of it.

And all the various major belief systems out there tell me, in one way or other, to not have the feelings I have. I decided to test whether they were right, treat their judgments of the limbic system as falsifiable. I think they are wrong. Though this is more lived than asserted. I stopped trying not to feel what I feel in all the ways everyone from the scientific community to the various religions to pharmapsychiatry to the new age to the business world to folk beliefs to 'common sense' say that one must. It is amazing how much these seemingly different groups have overlapping, often nearly the same judgments of the limbic system. Going in precisely the opposite direction to all their objectivisms about emotions, I find myself less crazy, quite grounded, not violent, able to be rational and more able to make the life I want, at least around those parts I can affect. IOW their judgements do not seem to be grounded in reality and the people I am intimate with have, over a long period of time decided not to accept these actually not supported by research judgments to lock emotions down.

I can imagine this sounding like an objectivism, but I see it as a decision not to listen to all these 'truths' about how I am suppose to judge, lock down, eliminate, suppress as a rule my emotions.

I mention my history since it is relevant regarding fragmentation and fracturedness.

So while I certainly look at the world and am horrified and do wish to make nudges in directions I prefer and this includes nudges coming from empathy about all the horrors out there, my efforts are not trying to prove this or that is the objective good, though that might be a tactic in some interaction.

If I can't treat those I love well, I doubt I will save the planet.

....is a reasonable understanding of human is/ought interactions in a No God world. Perhaps even the most reasonable.

3] "do you have any reason to believe what you are trying to find 'works' and 'exists'"?

Back again to #2.

Something can be calculated to work if everyone can agree on what it is that constitutes "working"?

I don't think that is the case. I can't figure out what works for me via everyone. Shit most people thought slavery was working.

Does the technology/methodolgy employed by penal institutions to execute prisoners work? Well, yes or no, right?

Do the arguments employed by those on either side of the political spectrum work to establish the most rational policy here...or a policy said to embody the "best of all possible worlds"?

You tell me.

I thought when you said 'it works for you' referring to me, you meant somethign more personal. You can't have meant that everyone thinks it works. Nearly everyone is quite ignorant of what I do, think, feel and how I approach making things better. When I returned the question, I mean, t does what you do work for you?

Everyone has not yet agreed about anything. Not even scientific conclusions.

I gotta make choices when I wake up in the morning. I can't wait for everyone, especially since I don't respect many of everyone.

Then maybe we are just "stuck" here. How can I make it any clearer then to note the historical facts that everyone can agree on regarding fascism, and the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no philosophers, ethicists or political scientists have yet been able to establish definitively that fascism works better than all other governing bodies.

Does it? How would this be demonstrated? And how would the anti-fascists demonstrate that it reflects instead the worst of all possible governing bodies?

As for "I" in all of this, I was raised in a truly reactionary community. I was a racist, a sexist, a homophobe. The folks I lived around constituted precisely the sort of white working class demographic that flock to Trump today. I don't recall the word fascism coming up in my neighborhood but I suspect I would have embraced it.

Then the Army. Then Vietnam. Then Mac and John and Steve and all the folks that reconfigured "I" from a right wing fanatic into a radical leftist. Then John and Mary and Barrett and "rival goods". Then existentialism, deconstruction, semiotics. Then nihilsm.

Then the fucking hole.

Sure, I get that. I am asking if your approach to life is working for you. The seeking to find a way to resolve conflicting goods via rational argument. That in combination with distraction. And then if it seems like it will work, maybe some day. Looking at it as a choice. You respond with the world's experts not being able to prove or disprove the bestness of fascism.

It seems like you are evaluating how you approach life by looking at the arguments of experts about huge political systems. To me these are in different categories. Which does not mean that your concerns about the inability of experts to resolve such HUGE issues should not be important to you. It just seems like trying to figure out what to eat for dinner tonight based on Confuscism vs. Mormonism. And not cooking anything while the debate goes on. Let's say there is a solution. That one day the types of people who get drawn to the right and the type of people who get drawn to the left finally together somehow come to agree on THE GOOD. That sounds like generations away if ever. Vietnam puts you at the youngest possible 18 in 1975. So 1957, so now youngest possible 61. Likely your body has been through some shit, even if, say you got no Agent Orange, direct traditional wounds or severe PTSD. Working class possibly threw some problematic dietary routines at you for a while. It seems not unfair to say that the chances of these broad categories coming to unity, in your lifetime are small. Not because of a decade here or there, but orders of magnitude away from that. Philosophers have been trying for thousands of years and I would say, aren't, in the main, trying so much for objective morals. Some may argue within morals, more or less leaving alone as an axiom that there are, and others more focused on pragmatic approaches to heuristics. Objectivists, in the main, are not trained in philosophy, so they likely lack the tools to examine their own arguments very well. It would be a bit of a miracle if it happened in your lifetime.

To me that response you make above to is it working and will it work seems so abstract. If you were Bernie Sanders, before his campaign collapsed via Hillary and DP back room shit...no even then, even before it fell apart, it's so abstract.

Ah,this will come off as me saying you should be doing something else. But it was as if I asked a person what he was up to and if it was working and the answer was a quote from Hegel commenting on a particular war.

But you want someone to give you the tool that will convince everyone how to choose objectively between two moral positions on any issue.

I do not possess that tool, nor do I have a direction to nudge you in where I even remotely intuit the answer might lie. Stanford Phil Encyc has this article...

Right vs. LeftShame vs. GuiltCorporate oligarchy vs. Statist bureaucracyAdvertising vs. HollywoodMaterialism vs. GoodismClassical vs. RomanticPretends to be strong vs. Pretends to be weakWillng to fuck over millions of people for a corporation vs. Willing to deny the fucking over of millions because of a dreamShallow cardboard heroes vs. Jesus figure heroesCocaine vs. Marijuana - that is two different delusions, one a cold much ado about nothing narcissism and the other a stinky passive 'love' neurosisWorship dead lefties vs. Worship dead lefties - yup they both doOT Christians vs. Mindfullness trainersFantasies have the feel of infomercials and Bruce Will movie trailers vs. Fantasies with the feel of movie of the week tearjerkers and, as a guily pleasure, Bruce Willis movie trailers.

Both will go to war to support soldiers put in danger to make someone a buck.Both have political correctnesses and both are stupid enough to think the Left invented the only oneBoth have their own version of self-hatred and they hate the other's version.One shames their kids, the other guilt trips themThey are both addicted to being seen as the two optionsNeither one can see through the BS of pharma's war on emotionsBoth are addicted to their digital devices and distractionNeither one can deal with diversity and will pound everyone into boxes, though they have different boxesBoth Incapable of seeing their own contribution to the idiocy and sufferingBoth easily manipulated by the sharks WHO COULD NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT EITHER RIGHT OR LEFT VALUESand love when you guys pick one sidelike Fixed Crossand present yourselves like victimswhich both sides do.

And, in part, because "here and now" I am still convinced that this...

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

.......is a reasonable understanding of human is/ought interactions in a No God world. Perhaps even the most reasonable.

OK. I can get that, i guess. It was challenging when I started to feel distance from the left. I identified with them. I don't really now. For most of my life this did not mean I thought in terms of objective morals. But still I identified, felt aligned with them. Preferred how they interacted with children - me being one for a while - and the world they seemed to want to create. Don't get me wrong, I still tend to prefer to hang out with lefties. There is more of a home there, but perhaps one difference between you and me is I always felt alienated by every group: religious, philosophical, political, cultural.

Sure, I can relate to that. There were always misgivings on my part regarding the extent to which my mentors [sacred or profane] reflected the Whole Truth about right and wrong, good and bad behaviors. But to the best of my recollection that revolved more around perfecting "one of us" rather than in critiquing "one of them".

But that simply reflects the manner in which I construe your "I" and my "I" here -- re moral and political value judgments -- as profoundly problematic identities embedded existentially in experiences that might have overlapped in some respect but were entirely different in other ways.

But, most crucially of all, I recall that either through God or political ideology, I felt this strong psychological sense of being grounded in a narrative/agenda that gave my life a true sense of meaning and purpose.

But: it was the wholly unique experience I had with John and Mary, coupled with my immersion, intellectually, in existentialism, that set into motion a frame of mind that began to crumble/crumple more and more with each passing year.

You, apparently, were never quite as embedded in that sort of "comfort and consolation".

I, on the other hand, managed, to the best of my recollection, to buy into objectivism hook, line and sinker back then. The flavor mattered less than the fact that one way or another I was hooked. And, let me tell you, when you lose that feeling by tumbling down into the hole that I'm in now, it is still always there to remind you of what you no longer have access to. At least not here and now.

So, sure, there is always the possibility that this "psychological bent" is still propelling me. I'm no less "hooked" on nihilism derived [perhaps subconsciously] from the manner in which I have hooked myself on being in the hole I'm in.

It's all [still] just a way to convince myself that I understand the world around me "better" than others who don't think like me.

I would never deny that.

Karpel Tunnel wrote:My focus has then been for a long time unification in myself and finding people who I do not experience I must actively hide much from. Always a matter of degree, but I have found people where there is such a degree of acceptance between us that it is qualitatively different.

Well, the "degree" to which you have accomplished this seems beyond my reach here and now. I can never really be certain that any particular thing that I think [re the is/ought world] is not somehow just embedded in the constellation of existential variables that predisposed me to believe this instead of that. Only those who are down in this hole with me might come to grips with the ambiguity, the ambivalence and the sheer uncertainty in which "I" is now fractured and fragmented.

And yet somehow in this way...

Karpel Tunnel wrote: I follow anomolies, things that do not fit what experts tell us is the good and the real. I see no mainstream paradigm that adequately explains what I can repeatedly experience, not all of it.

And all the various major belief systems out there tell me, in one way or other, to not have the feelings I have. I decided to test whether they were right, treat their judgments of the limbic system as falsifiable. I think they are wrong. Though this is more lived than asserted. I stopped trying not to feel what I feel in all the ways everyone from the scientific community to the various religions to pharmapsychiatry to the new age to the business world to folk beliefs to 'common sense' say that one must. It is amazing how much these seemingly different groups have overlapping, often nearly the same judgments of the limbic system. Going in precisely the opposite direction to all their objectivisms about emotions, I find myself less crazy, quite grounded, not violent, able to be rational and more able to make the life I want, at least around those parts I can affect. IOW their judgements do not seem to be grounded in reality and the people I am intimate with have, over a long period of time decided not to accept these actually not supported by research judgments to lock emotions down.

I can imagine this sounding like an objectivism, but I see it as a decision not to listen to all these 'truths' about how I am suppose to judge, lock down, eliminate, suppress as a rule my emotions.

...your own particular "I" has landed on more stable ground. But how could I ever really even begin to grasp how you accomplished this given [no doubt] the extent to which your own experiences simply do not overlap mine.

From an earlier post, here is my own "history" in a nutshell:

I grew up in the belly of the working class beast. I worked in shipyards and steel mills. I was drafted into the Army and spent a calamitous year in Vietnam. After being discharged I matriculated into college [in the tumultuous 70s] and for the next 6 years there was practically nothing I did not try at least once. I then spent nearly 25 years in a veritable alphabet soup of radical political organizations. I was married, divorced and raised my daughter as a single parent.

How many other folks here even come close to this? So, of course the manner in which they construe "I" out in the is/ought world will no doubt be very, very different from mine.

Something can be calculated to work if everyone can agree on what it is that constitutes "working"?

Karpel Tunnel wrote: I don't think that is the case. I can't figure out what works for me via everyone. Shit most people thought slavery was working.

Slavery working or not working depends on what can be calculated. If you employ slaves in order to prosper and then through slavery you do in fact prosper how has it not worked for you?

And back then there were any number of folks able to make what they construed to be reasonable arguments [moral arguments] for embracing slavery. Some even rooted in God and religion.

My point here revolves around the assumption -- and that's all it is -- that while my own political prejudices here and now are embedded in the personal belief that enslaving other human beings is wrong [as a political prejudice] I have no way in which to demonstrate philosophically that slavery is necessarily wrong; and that all rational and virtuous men and women are therefore obligated to reject it.

Same with fascism. Same with all other conflicting goods.

Does the technology/methodolgy employed by penal institutions to execute prisoners work? Well, yes or no, right?

Do the arguments employed by those on either side of the political spectrum work to establish the most rational policy here...or a policy said to embody the "best of all possible worlds"?

You tell me.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: I thought when you said 'it works for you' referring to me, you meant somethign more personal. You can't have meant that everyone thinks it works. Nearly everyone is quite ignorant of what I do, think, feel and how I approach making things better. When I returned the question, I mean, t does what you do work for you?

No, my point here always involves making a distinction between whatever any particular individual might think about capital punishment [as an existential contraption, as a political prejudice] and that which philosophers are able to establish as the moral obligation of all rational human beings.

If philosophy is thought by many to be the search for wisdom, what then are the wise men and the wise women to make of capital punishment as a moral issue? What argument, analysis, assessment etc., works best here?

As opposed to those who are hired to create a device that actually will work successfully in executing the prisoner.

How are these different things?

Karpel Tunnel wrote: I gotta make choices when I wake up in the morning. I can't wait for everyone, especially since I don't respect many of everyone.

Then we are back once again to the fact that in this regard, you have somehow managed to feel less fractured and fragmented than I have. Still, on the other hand, with respect to the hardcore moral and political objectivists among us, you seem closer to me than to them.

Then maybe we are just "stuck" here. How can I make it any clearer then to note the historical facts that everyone can agree on regarding fascism, and the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no philosophers, ethicists or political scientists have yet been able to establish definitively that fascism works better than all other governing bodies.

Does it? How would this be demonstrated? And how would the anti-fascists demonstrate that it reflects instead the worst of all possible governing bodies?

As for "I" in all of this, I was raised in a truly reactionary community. I was a racist, a sexist, a homophobe. The folks I lived around constituted precisely the sort of white working class demographic that flock to Trump today. I don't recall the word fascism coming up in my neighborhood but I suspect I would have embraced it.

Then the Army. Then Vietnam. Then Mac and John and Steve and all the folks that reconfigured "I" from a right wing fanatic into a radical leftist. Then John and Mary and Barrett and "rival goods". Then existentialism, deconstruction, semiotics. Then nihilsm.

Then the fucking hole.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: Sure, I get that. I am asking if your approach to life is working for you.

It works, sure. But only to the extent that I am still able to find some measure of fulfillment [pleasure, satisfaction] in the food I eat, the music I listen to, the movies I watch, the exchanges I sustain etc.

But all of that unfolds in a world construed by me to be essentially meaningless on this side of the grave; and with the grave itself [oblivion] getting closer and closer and closer.

As for this...

Karpel Tunnel wrote: The seeking to find a way to resolve conflicting goods via rational argument. That in combination with distraction. And then if it seems like it will work, maybe some day. Looking at it as a choice. You respond with the world's experts not being able to prove or disprove the bestness of fascism.

...I can only take it one day at a time. As an existentialist. As someone still able to assume that each day can bring a new experience, relationship and source of information and knowledge.

Assuming of course that any of this is not only what it ever could have been in a wholly determine universe.

Karpel Tunnel wrote: But you want someone to give you the tool that will convince everyone how to choose objectively between two moral positions on any issue.

No, I want someone to describe to me how, out in the world of conflicting goods, their own experiences have allowed them to create a sense of self less fragmented and fractured than my own experiences have left me.

You have made that attempt and I appreciate it. As have others.

And, sure, who knows: Down the road I might come upon a frame of mind that startles me such that I actually begin to imagine it as a path up out of the hole I'm in now.

After all, what else is there here but to keep on keeping on?

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

Have you seriously not noted that most of the right has hated Trump all the way along?

Hate only comes from the Washinton, DC. right, right America at large loves Trump.

K: type in state polls about trump and notice that in every singlestate in America, that his polls numbers have dropped since may 2017 to I think, June 2018..... and that includes states thatare reliably red... in every single state in the United States....

so, no, America at large doesn't "love" IQ45...…..and his overall numbers are and have been pretty fixed at 51% negative and 40%positive... it might fluctuate from month to month, but it usuallyhangs around 51% negative.. and I might remind you that IQ45 lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes... so, he isn't even very popular,little less loved........

Kropotkin

"Those who sacrifice liberty for securitywind up with neither." "Ben Franklin"

WendyDarling wrote:Peter, the fact that you still trust the fictional polls says it all. The polls are run by the leftists, thus they're false. Duh!

K: but I thought the leftist ran Hollywood, or maybe that was the jews,but Jews seem to be awfully busy running running the world's economicsystem to be involved in some petty movie industry...…...but wait, I rememberreading about how Shira law was taking over in the United States and how entire citieswas under Shira law and if you weren't muslim you didn't go into those area's but if Muslims were taking over the United States, what happened to the Jews? I thought it was the Jews who were taking over the United States.....and I thought it was the liberal elites were were taking over, but wait....are the liberal elites Jewish or Muslim? I forgot..... Maybe the big wall charts youhave that keep track of who is running the world today will tell me who I am suppose to be against today.... Is it the Jews, the liberal, the liberal elitist, the Muslimsor perhaps it the blacks who seem to be taking over.... and they are clearly muslim because anyone who is black is clearly muslim like Obama... who was bornin Kenya or some other foreign nation like Hawaii..............or maybe, maybeit is really the aliens from space how are hiding behind the Jews or was it the liberal elites?into really running the world and I wonder how the Jews or muslims or whoever is who think they are running the world is getting their orders from the space aliens who is actuallyin charge leaving the Jews or the liberal elite or the muslims to think they are in chargewhen it is really the space aliens who are in charge....because we all know that the moon landings were faked, oh, wait, faked, that is why we have fake newstoday because the moon landings were faked in 1969 and that directly lead to the fake news we are having today.... I saw some very suspious activity in the sky tonight and I am pretty sure it was the jew/liberal/liberal elite/muslim getting their orders from the space aliens who use lights in the sky to transmit their orders to earth.....

it is all very, very worrisome..... I lay in bed at night and wonder how anybodycan sleep when it is so obvious that the space aliens have taken the polls and turn it against the single greatest man in the history of theworld.... Donald, I AM GOD, trump....I heard that Trump can walk on waterbut it is the space aliens who control the media, or was it the jews, was it the libeal elite, anyway, whoever ran the media that keep this wonderful newsfrom us.... how DONALD, I AM GOD, TRUMP can walk on water.....it is the aliensand their fake news that keeps us from hearing about this....the answer is rightin front of you if you weren't a commie loving, nigger loving, jew loving, space alien lovingtraitor to america...... it is clear to the rest of us REAL AMERICANS that its the jews,liberals, liberal elitist, muslim, space aliens that is keeping america down fromfrom learning the truth about the man who can walk on water.........

if only you would become wise and smart like me, you would know the truth....says wendydarling…..

K: I am too old to give a shit anymore.....beside in the new Amerika, you got keep everyone down except the old white folkswho own everything, like the Cock brothers and the Waltons........besides I was just joking and you have my thought and prayers becauseI am the victim here anyway and I was misquoted and the media is the enemybecause they are forcing us to go to war with whoever we are fighting with these days,I can't remember, Iran or North Korea...………. or whoever and its very important inthe new Amerika that we blame everyone else but ourselves.... so I am blaming the Jew/communist/liberal/liberal elitist/ space alien/niggers/muslims who are taking away my high tech job and forcing me to live on welfare, if theyonly left the country, I could live like a millionaire and be bff with Oprah...…

If only....

your space alien loving denigrated white person....

"Those who sacrifice liberty for securitywind up with neither." "Ben Franklin"

we have become numb to the damage and hurt that the liesof the right have done...………

my point is to get some outrage..... why aren't you mad? why aren't you outraged?

for most people, they just don't care anymore...……they hide their head and hope the drama will go away....while they watch their TV shows about Hollywood stars.....instead of getting off their asses and doing something aboutthe fucking mess the world is in..... but to do something,you first of all, have to become outraged..... and I don't see the outrage....

I had mentioned that my political philosophy has changed... Inow see that the left must fight to protect people rights and lives and their interestas hard as the right does to take away those rights and lives and interest ……

the left has been far too passive and has allowed the right to walk all over them....I am fighting back, today with words, and if necessary, tomorrow with fists...….

I say to the left, fight with the same intensity and if necessary, the same violence.....only not to take away the rights of people, but to give the people the rights back...…

we can no long afford to be mister nice guy while the right destroys this country...….

not only could it happen here, IT ALREADY DID..... you just haven't seen it yet.....

and we must fight for our lives because that is what is at risk here, our lives...….

now some might say, we must not lower ourselves to fight down at their level.....

I say, screw that..... do what it takes to save America from becoming Taliban west...…..the other side is willing to lie, steal, cheat and yes, killto give to the economic overlords our hard earn money, every tax cut thewealthy get, it is less money for everyone else...….. and we must fight that,by every means necessary.... fight for your country as if the Nazi's have landedin Washington D.C. because they have...……. what will you do to save your countryfrom those who will try to throw anyone who is not the white/wealthy clubinto jail...……. so, once again, are you outraged?

I wished to god you were...… because we need outrage and anger, to fightthose who will put us into prison for not being "real" American's...………

be outraged..... for the love of god, that is the only hope for America, is for American's to become outraged at what is happening because it ishappening right now, right here...…………..

but put your outrage where it belongs, aimed at the right and fight,fight back with every resource at your disposal... and remember, weare not fighting with the Marquis of Queensbury rules... we are fighting for our lives, our liberty, our rights, don't fight fair, because the other side isn't fighting fair..they will do whatever it takes and so should you.........

Kropotkin

"Those who sacrifice liberty for securitywind up with neither." "Ben Franklin"

WendyDarling wrote:Didn't know that you are married to Maxine Waters Peter Waters, yes, as she said, fight dirty, be violent, yes that's you Peter...any means Peter.

K: class warfare against the middle class and the working pooras been on since Raygun was in office.... it is time to fight back....this war has been going on for a long time, it is time the middle classand the working poor fight back...…… I am Irish... when you getinto a fight with me, I don't take prisoners, I don't accept surrender, I don't fight nice,.... it is a fight to the death......I will kick you until you stop moving and then kick you a few more times....... bring it on.......

"Those who sacrifice liberty for securitywind up with neither." "Ben Franklin"

Why are so many Americans so divisive?It seems everytime the republicans get in, democrats are screaming: its the end of the world, and everytime the democrats get in, republicans are shouting: the sky is falling.Hate to toot our own horn, but we don't have this sort of sensationalist attitude in Canada.You're already a demi-fascunist two party dictatorship, like we are, so really what does it matter?

Last edited by Gloominary on Tue Aug 07, 2018 11:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gloominary wrote:Why are so many Americans so divisive?It seems everytime the republicans get in, democrats are screaming: its the end of the world, and everytime the democrats get in, republicans are shouting: the sky is falling.Hate to toot our own horn, but we don't have this sort of sensationalist attitude in Canada.You're already a demi-fascunist two party dictatorship, so really what does it matter?

Globalism...one party regime, fascist, dictatorship...sounds worse. At least Trump is trying to save our sovereignty. Have you been arrested or fined for using the wrong pronouns yet? Canada is even crazier.

I AM OFFICIALLY IN HELL!

I live my philosophy, it's personal to me and people who engage where I live establish an unspoken dynamic, a relationship of sorts, with me and my philosophy.

Cutting folks for sport is a reality for the poor in spirit. I myself only cut the poor in spirit on Tues., Thurs., and every other Sat.

I will deal with facts and only facts showing howthe middle class is getting squeezed....

IN 1970, the middle class held 62% of the aggregated wealthin the country and the upper class held 29%

in 2014, the middle class held 43% of the aggregated wealthand the upper class held 49%...

the % of middle class has fallen from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015

and the upper class has risen from 14% in 1971 to21% in 2015...

the number of union member has fallen by 2.9 millionsince 1983.....

the rate of union membership has gone from 20.19% in 1983to 11.1 % in 2015.....

wage stagnation is very well known: since the early 1970's thehourly inflation-adjusted wages received by the typical worker as onlygrown by 0.2% which means wages has not kept up with inflation....so the average worker has lost ground since the 70's in regards to income.....

the average amount of dept by the middle class in 1992 was32,200 and by 2014, 84,000 dollars......

the amount of net worth of the middle class has plunged...from 2007/ 120,000 to 2010 the net worth being 77,000

people living in poverty has risen from 11.3% in 2000 to 15.1% in 2010

in 1971 the middle class was the majority amount of wage earners, in 2010, the number of middel class earners were121.8 million people, or roughly a third

so what do these facts show us?

that the upper class has engaged with a war with the middle class and the upper class has been winning that war.....

these are facts, not guesses, not hysterical, not paranoid, but facts showing that the war on the middle classsince Raygun has been in effect and has been working......

we also know that the United States has greatly increasedits income inequality over the last 20 years.....

you cannot argue with facts....

Kropotkin

"Those who sacrifice liberty for securitywind up with neither." "Ben Franklin"

and we know that this happens regardless of which party is in the White House or who dominates Congress. We know that Obama, the potentially most liberal President in recent years, immediately brought as his financial team the very people responsible for the policies and practices that led to the financial crisis. This income gap thing no longer, if it ever did, have anything to do with this party or that party. Both parties are beholden to and in love with Wall St. Whatever they whisper to the spouses when going to sleep at night. Not one of them has the guts, so let's not presume interest, to go public with qualms about the power of corporations and Wall st. and bankers while they are Presidents.

Gloominary wrote:Why are so many Americans so divisive?It seems everytime the republicans get in, democrats are screaming: its the end of the world, and everytime the democrats get in, republicans are shouting: the sky is falling.Hate to toot our own horn, but we don't have this sort of sensationalist attitude in Canada.You're already a demi-fascunist two party dictatorship, so really what does it matter?

Globalism...one party regime, fascist, dictatorship...sounds worse. At least Trump is trying to save our sovereignty. Have you been arrested or fined for using the wrong pronouns yet? Canada is even crazier.

I agree, I was taking the piss, as the Brits say, Canada is messed up too.